Synth-Pop and its Repercussions: New Anthology
Updated: Sep 26
Synth Pop Bangers its Repercussions
It is exciting to see Synth-pop and its Repercussions now appearing on the Bloomsbury website, complete with its cover design and details of the collection. Edited by Geoff Stahl, Nabeel Zuberi and Holly Kruse, the collection brings together a wide range of approaches to synth-pop, considering not only its sounds, technologies and production practices, but also its imagery, media histories, politics and cultural meanings. Importantly, it approaches synth-pop as an international and transnational phenomenon, moving beyond a straightforward UK- or US-centred account to consider its different local contexts, circuits and afterlives.
My chapter, “Cold War Atomic Pop: Synth Pop and the Aesthetics of Nuclear Armageddon,” considers the relationship between synth-pop, Cold War culture and the pervasive presence of nuclear anxiety during the late 1970s and 1980s. I’m particularly interested in the ways that electronic sounds, futurist imagery and pop forms could register the tensions of a period shaped by technological optimism alongside the possibility of nuclear catastrophe. The chapter sits within the book’s broader interest in the connections between technology, politics, culture and the imagination of the future. It will be fascinating to see how these themes emerge differently across the contributions in the collection.
Many thanks to Geoff, Nabeel and Holly for bringing the volume together and for creating the space for these different perspectives on synth-pop. It is great to finally see the project represented on the Bloomsbury site and to have a first look at the finished cover. I’m very much looking forward to seeing the book published and to reading the other contributions in full. For the complete playlist of bangers the editors have compiled a YouTube Playlist from Contributors.
Building on my chapter, which focused on the early 1980s, my current project considers the broader arch of synth pop's development into the 21st Century, with the working tile Synth Pop Bangers.The project explores how the synthesiser evolved from a space-age studio novelty and avant-garde texture into the primary instrument through which popular culture articulates technological modernity, urban alienation, and speculative futures. Emblematic of postmodern cultural practice, I argue that synth pop operates within a space of deliberate artifice. In these electronic soundscapes, surface glamour and plastic production function as "artefacts of paradox", generating complex, unexpected meanings by invoking both the utopian hopes and dystopian fears of late twentieth-century subcultures. Follow link below to find out more.
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